Review: 'Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks That Shook the World'

Along with their myriad musical innovations, The Beatles completely changed the way men were allowed to look when the group invaded the globe with their moppy tops and slender suits. They re-popularized facial hair, made the Cuban heel ubiquitous, and made it okay for guys to wear what were traditionally gals' clothes. For fashion-focused folks, these are developments every bit as earth-quaking as the tape loops of "Tomorrow Never Knows" or the orchestral crescendos of "A Day in the Life". To them, Deirdre Kelly's new book Fashioning the Beatles: The Looks That Shook the World will be what Revolution in the Head is to people who enjoy the group's music.

Review: The 23rd Turnoff's 'Michael Angelo: The Complete 1967 Recordings'

The 23rd Turnoff were one of those other Liverpudlian artists of the sixties. And unlike Gerry and the Pacemakers or Cilla Black or You-Know-Who, they never managed to rack up a satchel of hits. Unlike even less successful locals like The Koobas, The Mojos, or Wimple Winch, The 23rd Turnoff didn't even manage anything more than one single. But what a single it was! Released on Deram in that most fragrant of years, 1967, "Michael Angelo" b/w "Leave Me Here" was a two-headed tab of atmospheric, tuneful acid folk-pop. These were the best songs band leader and future solo artist Jimmy Campbell managed, but the Turnoff had some pretty good other songs in a similarly psychedelic mode ready to go. Sadly, Joe Meek and George Martin passed on producing the group, leaving The 23rd Turnoff to shuffle off into cult-rock history with nothing more than that one single and a handful of demos. 

Review: The Beatles' 'Revolver' Special Edition Vinyl Box Set

From the garage band simplicity of their first couple of albums to the more refined folk rock of their next few, and on to the genuine sophistication of Rubber Soul, the first half of The Beatles' career was a constant succession of progressions.

Review: The Beatles' 'Let It Be' Special Edition (Super Deluxe Vinyl Box Set)

As most Beatles fans know, the album ultimately released as Let It Be was not supposed to be The Beatles’ last. A peculiar set of circumstances caused the recordings, mostly made in January of 1969, to sit on the shelf for nearly a year. Consciously aware of how his band was supposed to break new ground with each new project, Paul McCartney envisioned their latest to be a multi-media event. Filmmaker Michael-Lindsay Hogg would document the sessions for the big screen. There would be a high-profile concert—The Beatles’ first in nearly three years—in an exotic location. There would also be an album, of course, but the discomfort of recording in a strange location (Twickenham Film Studios), at weird hours, and under the constant gaze of Lindsay-Hogg’s crew, all while suffering their own personal and business issues, made a mess of the sessions. Trying to hold it together, Paul got bossy. George Harrison quit. John Lennon cracked jokes. 

Review: 'The Beatles: Get Back'

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was The Beatles' first genuinely self-conscious attempt to claim the crown of pop's highest high artists, and that album's instantaneous and international take-over of the pop scene seemingly justified its creation. It also painted The Beatles as Big-A Artists into a corner and all they could do next was bring it all back home as Bob Dylan and The Band did as 1967 drew to a close. 

"The White Album" was a bit of a transitional project split between big productions worthy of '67 such as "Martha My Dear", "Dear Prudence", "Piggies", and "Good Night" and completely stripped roots returns like "Why Don't We Do It in the Road", "Helter Skelter", and "Your Blues". The Beatles resolved to get back to basics even more emphatically with Get Back, but the project's multimedia nature meant they were actually treading into new waters. They would create their follow up to "The White Album" in an unfamiliar location--Twickenham Film Studios--instead of Abbey Road Recording Studios. They would make their record under the constant eye of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg's film crew, and the results of that work and a planned return to the stage for the first time in nearly three years would appear in an accompanying documentary movie. 

Review: The Beatles' 'Abbey Road Anniversary Edition' on Vinyl

Perhaps The Beatles didn’t intend Abbey Road to be their final album, but that’s the way things turned out, and it’s difficult to listen to the album and not take its finality as a conscious statement from the band that rearranged the face of pop. The Beatles were still rearranging it at the end with the ingenious medley that salvaged several of Lennon and McCartney song scraps.

More significantly, the songs point to where each Beatle would head during his solo career. Lennon exorcised his demons Plastic Ono Band-style with “I Want You [(She’s So Heavy)” and played the dreamer Imagine-style with “Because”. McCartney served up a neat pastiche with “Oh! Darling” and the kind of fluff that would cause critics to pile on him—often unfairly—throughout the seventies with “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. With “Octopus’s Garden”, Ringo delivered the good-natured tunefulness apparent in the band’s most surprising solo success. George also showed he had the stuff to make what could be the seventies’ greatest album—All Things Must Pass—with his first-rate contributions “Something” and “Here Comes the Sun”.

Review: Vinyl Reissue of The Action's 'Rolled Gold'

Do your best to wrap your brain around The Action’s lack of widespread success. Reg King was possibly the UK’s finest smooth soul singer, several members of the band were capable of writing great songs, and they had George Martin in their corner. Perhaps The Action’s early singles were too reliant on previously recorded material and they adapted too late to the age of composing bands. There were certainly management issues. Whatever the case was, The Action made some of the best Mod-infused soul records of the mid-sixties, and when they started producing their own material, there were on the path to creating one of the best albums of 1967: the year that gets my vote for pop’s best one. 

Alas, the band’s shaky foundations crumbled before The Action could finish the LP they intended to call Rolled Gold. George Martin’s interest was never particularly keen and he decided to end his relationship with the band… though he first managed a characteristically grand production for “In My Dream”, the one song that progressed beyond the demo stage. Reg King left, and the remnants reformed as Mighty Baby. The Rolled Gold recordings were shelved for nearly 30 years until Dig the Fuzz Records put them out as Brain (The Lost Recordings 1967/68) in 1995. This selection of tough, intelligent psych pop—too serious to compare to The Who Sell Out (as has often been done), too controlled to be compared to Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake (ditto)—reverted to its intended title in 1997 and Reaction gave it wider release in 2002. Rolled Gold is now getting another go via Spain’s Guerssen with its first vinyl release since ’97. 

Once again, there’s a new cover with a mood-appropriate photo of the band in deep thought and neat gilt lettering, and once again, the music is fresh, powerful, beautiful, and forever provoking frustration that it wasn’t released in 1967. Though one wonders what other feats of magic George Martin might have performed with the other tracks, and the demo-nature of the recordings has always left the sound a touch on the harsh side, there are actually quite a few production strokes beyond the usual austerity of demo-making, such as the flute on “Climbing up the Wall” and the magnificent “Love Is All” and the horse hooves effects at the beginning of “Little Boy”. Bass is very fat on Guerssen’s vinyl, providing a decent counterpoint to the harsher high-end elements. An extensive article originally published in Shindig! last year is included in a large, illustrated insert as a nice supplement with this new LP, and as far as the legendary unfinished albums are concerned, Rolled Gold is still second only to The Beach Boys’ legendary SMiLE in my book. 

Review: 50th Anniversary Edition of 'Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band'

They can call those blues-peddling Stones a bunch of middle-class poseurs. They can call The Beach Boys too square. They can accuse The Monkees of being phony or The Who of being pretentious, but even the most hostile critics can’t say “boo” about the unassailable Beatles. This has been the prevailing consensus for some fifty years now— and let’s be honest— as far as pop legacies go, The Beatles’ is as airtight as it gets.

That does not mean that it’s perfect or that there is no room for improvement. Even The Beatles’ most influential and definitive album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, could use some gussying up, largely because of the obvious flaws of its original stereo mix which committed the same crimes as so many of The Beatles’ stereo mixes. As the now well-known story goes, The Beatles were mono purists who usually baled on George Martin’s hastily performed stereo mixing sessions. Those stereo mixes tended to be poorly balanced and lacked some of the carefully considered signature touches of the mono mixes. On Sgt. Pepper’s, songs that were treated with effects in the mono mix might lack them in stereo. Tracks that had their speed altered in mono might not receive the same colorations in stereo. Consequently, and perhaps ironically since stereo is made for hearing the full spectrum of trippy music through headphones, the mono mix of The Beatles’ psychedelic opus ended up more psychedelic than the stereo mix.

Review: 'Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years' Blu-ray

When it was announced last year, Ron Howard’s documentary about The Beatles’ first years of global success seemed like the last thing the world needed. This is a story that has been told and told and told on the page and on the screen. Didn’t the 10-hour Beatles Anthology negate the need for any new documentaries on the topic of Fabness for all days to come?

Taking Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years on its own merits probably won’t alter that initial assumption much. 

Despite its near improbable subtitle The Band You Know. The Story You Don’t. there is basically nothing in this movie that will be new to even the most casual fan. There isn’t even much story here. Howard assembles his film in chaotic fashion, with the band (Paul and Ringo in recent footage; John and George in vintage, obviously), their coworkers (George Martin, Neil Aspinall, journalist and biographer Larry Kane), and fans (Whoopie Goldberg, Elvis Costello, Sigourney Weaver) providing scattershot impressions of the usual subtopics: America, Beatlemaniacs, Brian Epstein, filmmaking, friendship, songwriting, recording, Shea Stadium, “bigger than Jesus,” etc. The footage is often familiar too, though one clip of a huge crowd of Liverpudlian football fans, who look like they could take a kick to the teeth as well as they could dish one out, all singing “She Loves You” was new to me and utterly delightful.

The information is so basic that I can only assume that Howard intended his film to be a primer for potential new fans, though I really wonder how much this material will move fans of contemporary pop. I hope it will move them, because the one major merit of Howard’s film is it gives a very clear sense of the hope and joy The Beatles brought to the world in their time. And if there is one thing our world can really use right now is hope and joy. Also of contemporary value is the extended focus on The Beatles’ rejection of segregation at their shows, their refusal to treat fans of any color or culture differently than anyone else. That kind of understanding, that clear idea of what is fundamentally right and what is fundamentally wrong is something else the world really, really needs right now.

Apple/UMe’s new blu-ray of Eight Days a Week: The Touring Years arrives with a bonus disc with another feature film’s worth of supplements. There are clips of performances of five songs. Featurettes expand on the feature’s discussions of the Lennon/McCartney partnership, the way The Beatles revolutionized music and culture, Shea Stadium, A Hard Day’s Night, and their visits to Australia and Japan won’t enlighten long-term fans much more than the proper film will, though there are some interesting sideroads, such as Peter Asher’s discussion of his Peter and Gordon getting in on the Lennon/McCartney goldmine, Tony Bennett’s son’s recollections of seeing The Beatles at Shea, and Ronnie Spector’s memories of meeting the guys she classified as "four foxes" and going shopping with them on Carnaby Street.

Review: 'The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl'

With The Beatles and A Hard Day’s Night are effervescent, explosive albums, but neither quite translates the mania part of Beatlemania accurately. That was defined by hordes of screaming girls and boys stampeding toward the four lads intent on grabbing a hunk of hair or a pound of flesh as a souvenir of the obsession that defined their youthful years. The album that best captures that aspect of Beatles history is The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl. Released in 1977 amid EMI’s first wave of Beatles repackages and vault sweepings that included Rock ‘n’ Roll Music and Love Songs, Hollywood Bowl was the first official Beatles live album. When asked to assemble the set, George Martin had misgivings about the quality of the recordings, the most obvious issue being the constant blanket of white noise from the crowd that covers every track. Of course, this is what makes Hollywood Bowl such an authentic document of cuckoo Beatlemania.

In the days before it matured with late-sixties items like Jefferson Airplane’s Bless Its Pointed Little Head and The Rolling Stones’ Get Yer Ya Yas Out, Rock & Roll concert recording tended to emphasize pandemonium over stagecraft. Drums bashed in a primitive attempt to maintain the tempo without proper monitors. Singers shouted the words to give the shrieking throngs a general idea of what song was being played. Bass and/or guitar vanished in the din. Teenagers lost their minds. This was the sound of The Kinks’ Live at Kelvin Hall and the Stones’ Got Live If You Want It. It was not entirely musical, but it was completely exciting.

Hollywood Bowl actually sounds clearer than either of those sets. The screaming is constant, yet instruments don’t really get lost in the mix and The Beatles’ singing is admirably polished, their harmonies sounding as effortless on stage as they did in the studio. At least that’s the case with Giles Martin and James Clarke’s new remix and four-bonus-track expansion of The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl released as a tie-in with Ron Howard’s upcoming documentary about The Beatles’ stage performance years (a fact blared without tact on the album’s unimaginative new cover). The instruments are better defined than ever and less overwhelmed by the crowd noise. Completely scrubbing that noise from the record would violate its purpose, and the shrieks remain very present throughout so you can still crank it up in your living room and shriek along like you did 51 years ago without feeling like too much of a doofus. 

Farewell, George Martin

Without him, there would have been no Beatles as we know them. George Martin didn't just produce their records--filling such tall orders as John's request that the listener could "smell the sawdust" on the fairground fancy "Being for the Benefit of Mr.Kite"--but also giving the band the thumb's up so they could record for Parlophone in the first place. As a fine musician, his piano skills also brought genuine Rock & Roll life to "Money" or baroque elegance to "In My Life". 

Martin's legacy will forever be tethered to that of The Beatles, but he also produced records for a wide range of artists, including the Goons' comedy discs (which greatly impressed super-fan John), Shirley Bassey's orchestral pop, and Cheap Trick's hard rock. Needless to say, it is very sad that George Martin died yesterday at the age of 90, but he sure used those 90 years well.

Review: 'Produced by George Martin'

A good documentary not only tells its subject’s tale but also reflects that subject’s nature. Charming, homey, witty, and pastorally English, Produced by George Martin is impeccably toned. Francis Hanly’s 2011 BBC doc about the fellow who masterminded almost everything The Beatles ever recorded is like a leisurely flip through the Martin family album or afternoon tea with friends such as Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Michael Palin. Martin and his associates chat about a career that can only be described as spectacular in casual, borderline elegiac fashion. The effect is completely intimate, though moments are undeniably splashy, because after all these years, odd vintage footage is still being uncovered. How can that be possible when dealing with such an over-analyzed period? Yet, there it is, funny footage of The Beatles frolicking with their Madame Tussauds wax figures way back in 1964. Even more exciting is a scene capturing Cilla Black recording her mighty version of “Anyone Without a Heart” with Burt Bacharach conducting.

But let’s not stray too far off our subject, no matter how humble he may be. Even in the shadow of an entity as massive as The Beatles, George Martin remains the focus throughout the film, and he discusses his work, his innovations, his family, his hearing loss, and his dwindling years with grace and humor. He wanted to be “Rachmaninoff II” but had to settle for being the most famous and revered record producer on Earth. Not a bad backup gig.

Review: 'Beatles for Sale on Parlophone Records'

Have there ever been four people more thoroughly scrutinized, analyzed, biographized, and chroniclized than The Beatles? Their tours and recording sessions, lives and wives, their music and lyrics, their merchandise and solo records, their political implications and shoe sizes have all formed the bases of Beatle books for Beatle people. Bruce Spizer has devoted the last decade to covering what may be the most vital byproduct of Beatlemania: the little 7” and 12” discs that housed all their spectacular music. His two volumes of The Beatles’ Story on Capitol Records, The Beatles on Apple Records, and The Beatles Solo on Apple Records are now joined by Beatles for Sale on Parlophone Records, co-authored with Frank Daniels.

Spizer and Daniels’s book gets in the grooves of every 45, L.P., and E.P. released on Parlophone Records in the U.K. (and that includes their records with Apple labels, which actually weren’t Apple records at all). Each chapter on each record follows a consistent formula. Brief background comments on the relevant record are followed by its chart history, including the records they displaced from the top of the charts (because pretty much everything The Beatles released went to the toppermost of the poppermost). Then the writers delve deeper with details on the writing and recording of each song, how the records were promoted, and significant live performances of them. Then they cross assuredly into the geek zone, breaking down the different pressings of the records, the variations and errors on their labels, etc. Even Spizer recognizes that these last details will only appeal to hardcore collectors, warning more casual readers that they may want to skip over the bits about matrix numbers and fonts in his forward.

Indeed, Beatles for Sale on Parlophone Records is largely aimed at serious collectors who want to know the precise origins of their vintage Beatles records. The luxuriousness of this over-sized, glossy-paged, full-color book makes it a collector’s item in itself (as does the steep price tag). But all fab fans will find something to enjoy in Beatles for Sale on Parlophone Records, whether it’s the plethora of wonderful photos or the abundance of trivial tidbits. I’m sure there are die-hard Beatlemaniacs who are already familiar with every scrap of historical info in this book. I’ve read a good twenty volumes on the band, and a lot of this stuff was new to me. I did not know that the “A Hard Day’s Night”/“Things We Said Today” was originally intended to be promoted as a double-A side. I now fully understand the economic reasons for placing a mere 11 or 12 tracks on the Capitol albums in the U.S. I was surprised to read how far the German translations of “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” diverged from the original English lyrics. I was even more taken aback to learn that McCartney’s fuzz bass on “Think for Yourself” was not really a fuzz bass at all and that there is an odd connection between the “Flying” sequence in Magical Mystery Tour and Stanley Kubrick’s comedic masterwork Dr. Strangelove.

Spizer and Daniels also rise above the usual clinical collector’s guide writers by striking an informal, sometimes cheeky tone. The opening paragraphs of the Let It Be chapter are righteously funny. I also appreciate the attention they paid to aborted projects, such as both versions of the Get Back album and the Yellow Submarine E.P. that was scrapped in favor of an L.P. filled out with George Martin’s score. But someone needs to explain the difference between a tabla and a tamboura to the writers.